"Quatrain" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... what is done. On the occasion of the meeting of which the following gems of poesy are the result, the several members of the club engaged to write up the well-known tradition of the Purple Cow in more elaborate form than the quatrain made ...
— The Re-echo Club • Carolyn Wells
... can be worse than that? Then read this which I really told Hunt and got his praise for. Poor dear wonderful persecuted Pietro d'Abano wrote this quatrain on the people's plaguing him about his mathematical studies and wanting to burn him—he helped to build Padua Cathedral, wrote a Treatise on Magic still extant, and passes for a conjuror in his country to this ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... the king had appointed her a maid of honor. It is a question whether she did not even then exercise over Charles VII. that influence, serviceable alike to the honor of the king and of France, which was to inspire Francis I., a century later, with this gallant quatrain: ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... therefore, became exiles, and took refuge in Egypt. And in the flow of days it so happened that the Shaykh of the Beni' Amr awoke suddenly at midnight, and heard his wife, as she sat grinding at the quern, sing this quatrain:— ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... "universal" poem in its setting and mood is completely English. One could go too far from home for examples of distinction—for the polar stars of the rude forefathers—just as one could err by excess of "commonplace" reflections. Some such idea encouraged Gray to modify his fifteenth quatrain, which in the Eton MS reads (the first line has partly perished ...
— An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard (1751) and The Eton College Manuscript • Thomas Gray
... the field of Venus may readily be imagined from a quatrain that was affixed in a conspicuous part of the Church of St. Hyacinthe, ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... many. They are much alike in hue and feature; speak amongst themselves much the same tongue; exercise much the same trades, and are addicted to the same evil practices. There is a little English Gypsy gillie, or song, of which the following quatrain is a translation, containing four queries, to all of which the English Romano might respond by Ava, and the foreign Chal by the same affirmative to the three first, if not ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... at the end of the twelfth canto of the Paradiso. Yet in his time poetry was recitatived to music. So it was in Petrarch's, who was a lutenist, and who "tried" his verses, to see how they would go to the instrument. Yet Petrarch could allow himself to write such a quatrain as the following ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... description is spoilt by terrible bathetics from time to time. Guinevere in her white nightdress and mantle of scarlet and camus[26] on one side of the bars, Lancelot outside, exchanging sweet salutes, "for much was he fain of her and she of him," are excellent. The next couplet, or quatrain, almost approaches the best poetry. "Of villainy or annoy make they no parley or complaint; but draw near each other so much at least that they hold each other hand by hand." But what follows? That they cannot come together vexes them so immeasurably that—what? They blame ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... rather insipid quatrain was tortured into a baleful prophecy. It was considered very ominous that the battery should be first opened against this Sibylline tower. The chimes, too, which had been playing, all through the siege, the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Fernie Brodie, who was born in 1736, and died in 1817, she knew how two generations before her people lived and thought. So that I have a grasp on the past which many might envy, and yet the present and the future are even more to me, as they were to my mother. On her death in 1887 I wrote a quatrain for her memorial, and which those who knew her ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... prospects; nay, even the circumstances and surroundings of her friends and few intimates came to be regarded in the same unsatisfactory light. She was unacquainted with the healthy tone of wisdom contained in the old quatrain,— ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... gazal Platen has also attempted the ruba'i or quatrain, in which form he wrote twelve poems (Werke, ii. pp. 62-64), and the qasidah. Of this there is only one specimen, a panegyric (for such in most cases is the Persian qasidah) on Napoleon, and, as may therefore be ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... be within a day of his ruin, but that was no reason why he should not sip his iced sherbet and laugh with a pretty French actress to-night. His epicurean formulary was the same as old Herrick's, and he would have paraphrased this poet's famous quatrain into ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... and still to pursue Him is the soul's paradox of love, scorned indeed by the too-easily-satisfied religionist, but justified in happy experience by the children of the burning heart. St. Bernard stated this holy paradox in a musical quatrain that will be instantly understood ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... form a kind of literary club, meeting at certain periods to read essays or poems on subjects previously agreed upon by all. We heard of one youth who, burning for the poet's laurel, produced the following quatrain on snow, which had been chosen as ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... enamored of her husband after having deceived him. She discovered that her lover was not worth her husband. Such a thing does happen. She was the daughter of the most whimsical Marshal of France, and of that pretty Countess of —— to whom M. de Chateaubriand, after a night of love, composed this quatrain, which may now be ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... feeling—they are like birds that not only enchant us with their delicious notes, but nestle against us with their soft breasts, and make us feel the agitated beating of their hearts. He indicates a whole sad history in a single quatrain; there is not an image in it, not a thought; but it is beautiful, simple, and perfect as a "big round tear"—it is pure feeling, ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... vehement abundance refused those narrow banks, first running over into a triplet, and, even then uncontainable, rising to an alexandrine in the concluding verse. And I have little doubt that it was the roominess, rather than the dignity, of the quatrain which led him to choose it. As apposite to this, I may quote what he elsewhere says of octosyllabic verse: "The thought can turn itself with greater ease in a larger compass. When the rhyme comes too thick upon us, it straightens the expression: we are thinking of the close, when we ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... which has ever been really adopted and naturalized in English, and it still remains the best instrument for the terse expression of a single poetic thought. Wyatt, it should be observed, generally departs from the Petrarchan rime-scheme, on the whole unfortunately, by substituting a third quatrain for the first four lines of the sestet. That is, while Petrarch's rime-arrangement is either a b b a a b b a c d c d c d, or a b b a a b b a c d e c d e, Wyatt's is usually a b b a a b b a c d d c ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... improvise. In the province of the Minho it is not uncommon at these gatherings for a match of improvisation to be held between two rustic bards. One takes his guitar, and in a slow, drawling recitative sings a simple quatrain, which the other at once caps with a second in rhyme and rhythm matching the first. Verse follows verse in steady succession, and the singer who hesitates is lost: his rival rushes in with a tide of rhyme which ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... not wholly sentimental may be proved, I think, by an exchange of verses, which we owe to Vasari's literary sagacity. He tells us that when the statue of the Night was opened to the public view, it drew forth the following quatrain from an author ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... of the viscera on record. This bizarre anomaly was probably observed first in 1650 by Riolanus, but the most celebrated case was that of Morand in 1660, and Mery described the instance later which was the subject of the following quatrain:— ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... subtle and not to be understood by everyone. Bach after Lili Kerth—that is the bite, that is the irony of things. Do you know Baudelaire's quatrain?" ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... energy to a commercial battle with La Friponne, determined to supply the people with food at low prices. The enmity between Philibert and the Intendant was common talk, and over his doorway the merchant had hung, beneath the figure of a dog in bas-relief, the following whimsical quatrain:— ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... lines in the album and departed in haste, while Mademoiselle Jacquemart was reading the following quatrain, improvised in her honour ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... beguiled the way down to the Hotel du Paradis, under the Mausoleum heights, where Skepsey fumbled at his pocket for coin current; but the Frenchman, all shaken by a tornado of negation, clapped him on the shoulder, and sang him a quatrain. Skepsey had in politeness to stand listening, and blinking, plunged in the contrition of ignorance, eclipsed. He took it to signify something to the effect, that money should not pass between friends. It was the amatory farewell ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... waters of the open North Sea. To my surprise the steamer, though island-owned, did not fly the British red ensign, but the Heligoland flag of horizontal bars of white, green, and red. There is a local quatrain explaining these colours, which may ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... this title is printed a short address from the translator to the Edele ende welghesinde Leser, which states little more than that the original had been received from England, and concludes with the subsequent quatrain:— ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 67, February 8, 1851 • Various
... him at an obscure Batignolles cafe, the cafe Guerbois (still existing), public derision baptized these meetings with the name of "L'Ecole des Batignolles." Manet then exhibited the Angels at the Tomb of Christ, a souvenir of the Venetians; Lola de Valence, commented upon by Baudelaire in a quatrain which can be found in the Fleurs du Mal; the Episode d'un combat de taureaux (dissatisfied with this picture, he cut out the dead toreador in the foreground, and burnt the rest). The Acteur tragique (portrait of ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair |
